Sigrid Wortmann Weltge - Gunta Stölzl, 1993

Gunta Stölzl was the dominant presence in the Weaving Workshop. In facts its evolution paralleled her own development. The student who entered the Bauhaus in 1919 would leave it in 1931 as a consummate professional, the only female Bauhaus master.

Stölzl has been described as personally modest yet strong-willed and tenacious professionally, and as totally committed to her goals. From 1914 to 1916 she studied painting, ceramics and art history at the School of Applied Arts in Munich. During the following two years she served as a Red Cross nurse behind the front lines and in 1919 resumed her studies for an additional term. Actively involved in curriculum reform at her school, she encountered the Bauhaus manifesto which impressed her so much that she traveled to Weimar to meet Gropius. Stölzl vividly remembered her arrival: "what did I find? A small group of students, more men than girls. A big building with studios which were partially occupied by the old academy, next to it large empty rooms, a workshop building, a cafeteria, a studio building for students, but only for men." She spent the summer of 1919 first in a glass workshop and then a mural-painting class before being accepted, on a trial basis, onto Johannes Itten's preliminary course. She was fully matriculated in the spring of 1920 and by the autumn had received a full scholarship.

Stölzl claimed that she co-founded the "Women's Department" during her first year. It is certain that by 1920 she was active in the Weaving Workshop where she played a leading part from the outset. Her enthusiasm, vitality and the seriousness with which she pursued her quest for knowledge set an example to the other students and made her an undisputed role model. Anni Albers thought of her as the quintessential weaver, as "having almost an animal feeling for textiles." She was passionate in her concern for the Weaving Workshop unlike any of the masters, and could thus make it hers almost from the beginning.

Stölzl, a student among other students in those days, immediately gave direction to the workshop by exploring the craft and passing on her findings. With admiration for Stölzl, Albers recalled those early days: "There was no real teacher in textiles. We had no formal classes. Now people say to me: 'you learned it all at the Bauhaus'! We did not learn a thing in the beginning. I learned from Gunta, who was a great teacher. We sat down and tried to do it. Sometimes we sat together and tried to solve problems of construction." Stölzl's almost apologetic remark that students were autodidacts has often been repeated, but it should be clarified to mean "technical autodidacts". Nor should the much maligned early products of the workshop have to suffer from comparison with the later industrial textiles. It is true that some of them attest to the weavers' groping attempts to learn the craft without professional instruction; their execution is often amateurish. Selvages are wavy, the fabrics buckle, they are too tight. Yet many are remarkably well woven. The Weimar textiles have to be examined from a completely different point of view, not a technical but a visual one, for most of their creators already had a background in the arts.

Like Gunta Stölzl, almost all female students arrived at the Bauhaus with previous schooling. They were an exceptional group of pioneers at a time when educating women was not the norm. Barred from traditional art academies, they had studied at schools of applied arts and crafts, trade institutions and with individual professors. All of them were passionately interested in painting. Monica Bella-Broner simply said: "We were all addicted to arts." Georg Muche confirmed this statement in his autobiography. Itten's students, he said, did not fit the later perception of Bauhäusler as modern, pared down designers. Instead he said of them: "they were and remained art enthusiasts." What attracted them to the Bauhaus in the first place was the lure of the painters: "Klee and Kandinsky, those were the ones." - not instruction in weaving. A lifetime later Anni Albers remembered: "Weaving? Weaving I thought was too sissy. I was looking for a real job: I went into weaving unenthusiastically, as merely the least objectionable choice."

Some women, such as Dörte Helm, Kitty Fischer, Else Mögelin, Margarete Willers and Ida Kerkovius, were accomplished artists by the time they arrived at the Bauhaus. In fact, Kerkovius, who was one of the older students, had been Johannes Itten's teacher when he was still a young art student in 1913 and 1914. She was a member of the "Hölzel circle", a group of artists gathered around the painter Adolf Hölzel, who was best known for his contributions to colour theory. Itten formed a lifelong friendship with Kerkovius and recalled that at first he had found her paintings "rather strange" - a verdict later to be repeated by the Nazis who included her in their roster of degenerate artists. However, Itten praised her as a teacher and kept his sketchbooks from those lessons. "The most precious for me . . .", he wrote in his memoirs, was her "analysis of compositions by Giotto and pictures by Cezanne in which the same principles occurred as in Giotto."

Far from being novices, then, most female students came with an impressive background of visual knowledge. Like Gunta Stölzl, who toured Italy in the summer of 1921 to see the painting and architecture that she had studied in Munich, they were acquainted with the masterpieces of the past. The Bauhaus attracted them precisely because they admired its painters and because they were longing to be a part of what they clearly perceived as the avant-garde. The fact that Gropius appointed painters and not craftsmen to head the workshops has been endlessly debated and either hailed as a stroke of genius or decried as out of touch with reality. It was a dichotomy akin to his initial aspiration to elevate crafts to the level of art, although art was perceived as independent and not teachable. As a method of attracting gifted students it worked. The allure of the painters proved irresistible to a bright, modern youth, and women were no exception. Contemporary art proclaimed its faith in the individual and, therefore, in them. On the heels of Germany's devastating defeat art seemed to be the only way left to affect society at large.

Notebooks, diaries and letters attest to the fecund atmosphere of the early years. Nowhere else had these young women been exposed to philosophies like those of their great Bauhaus teachers. Kandinsky's advice that they should discard old ways of looking went hand in hand with Gropius's dictum that the mind should be cleared of all previous knowledge, in order to approach every problem as if for the first time. Paul Klee's leitmotif, visual thinking, was absorbed like gospel by the students, who nicknamed him, after all, "the dear Lord". Johannes Itten opened up a whole new world of emotional and intellectual perceptions on the path to free exploration. Festivities were carefully planned according to themes. Evenings at the Feiningers' were filled with music. "Even today", wrote Gunta Stölzl in 1968, "I believe that most important of all was life itself. It was brimful with impressions, experiences, encounters and friendships which have lasted over decades."

Under Gunta Stölzl's unofficial direction - neither Helene Börner nor Georg Muche was able to advance the students technically - problems were overcome in a remarkably short time. Stölzl's quick grasp and understanding of the looms' possibilities, her natural affinity for the materials and her love of exploration rapidly transformed the workshop into a functioning entity. In March 1922 she took a dye course at a textile school in Krefeld with fellow-student Benita Otte and soon afterwards she activated the dye laboratory, which had been idle since van de Velde's days. In 1923 the Weaving Workshop participated in the first official Bauhaus Exhibition by furnishing the experimental Haus am Horn with textiles which were singled out for favourable mention by the critics. The textiles of the Weimar period, far from being failed industrial specimens, were the first to reject traditional tapestry-weaving in favour of a whole new design vocabulary. They were pioneering works in their own right and must be viewed as logical translations of the art education received by the students.

After all, the Bauhaus boasted two teachers who were also among the most prominent proponents of abstract art in the twenties, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Another, the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg, who had aspirations to join the school, made his headquarters in Weimar in 1921 and contributed to the intellectual ferment. All three men demonstrated extraordinary facility with the written word, which was articulated in profusion if not always with clarity. A torrent of theories was tested on students and staff alike. Many weavers have credited Paul Klee with their understanding of colour and form even though some of his ideas were digested only much later. "One of his classes", Anni Albers remembered, "was so far over my head that I didn't understand anything and had to leave. I was not yet ready for Klee and his thinking." Georg Muche, less of a theorist, kept to himself, working on his own development as an artist, while Johannes Itten had a profound effect on the students in these early years.
Although vastly different in temperament, Kandinsky and Itten were both passionate about the artist's "inner self" and communicated this message to their students. Itten's greatest gift to the weavers, however, was an awareness, a heightened sensitivity to the material itself - all material.

How could these artistic tenets, experienced on a daily basis, fail to be applied in the Weaving Workshop? Early works by Gunta Stölzl, Martha Erps and others show convincingly that the students had internalized the new visual language and were able to express themselves fluently. Many Weimar textiles display a sophistication of design unique in the history of weaving. A decade earlier Kandinsky had written in "concerning the Spiritual in art": "The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct is its appeal . The more an artist uses these abstracted forms, the deeper and more confidently will he advance into the kingdom of the abstracted." The weavers, in producing textiles of pure abstracted form, were heeding his advice. That neither weaving nor women could easily "advance into the kingdom of the abstract" was yet another lesson to learn.